Spicy Tofu Recipes

The next few days mark the beginning of the Vietnamese Tết celebrations. A tradition of Tết is that you eat vegetarian (ăn chay) on the last day of the previous year and first day of Asian New Year, so I will be sharing several Vietnamese vegetarian dishes with you until the celebration commences.

I prepared a tofu dish that included a typical Vietnamese vegetable called trái su su in Vietnamese. It's also known as chayote in English, christophine in Creole and French and it's from the squash family. So as you can imagine, if not cooked over high heat (to allow as much liquid to evaporate as possible), the dish can become very watery and soggy. To balance the texture of the dish, I added crispiness by crumbling fried wonton wrappers.

Eating vegan foods doesn't necessarily mean they have to be bland. My goal to jazz up a Japanese eggplant and broccoli tofu dish was to add extra richness to the taste with coconut cream. The vegetables cooked fairly quickly, so I focused more on seasoning the sauce, using soy sauce, chile black bean sauce, palm sugar and coconut.

This coconut tofu is a great way for our family (baby Aria and I are the only ones not on a vegetarian diet) to share the same meal without missing meat. The tofu was flavorful with crispy texture and the added spiciness. With a dish like this one, you won't have naysayers claiming the tofu dish is too plain!

My husband Lulu's niece and nephew spent the afternoon with us. It was so nice having so many children in the house. Of course, our daughter Aria was the center of attention and she loved it! While they were playing with the baby, I prepared dinner. I cooked some brown rice (Lulu's request since the beginning of the new year) and made mushroom tofu stir fry.

The stir fry is composed of combined shiitake mushrooms, oyster mushrooms and enoki mushrooms, Japanese eggplant, sugar snap peas and tofu, of course!

Japanese eggplants cook fairly quickly and this stir fry sauce consists of basic ingredients such as soy sauce, chile black bean sauce, palm sugar and fresh ginger. The ginger and black bean sauce enhances the bland eggplant and tofu. All that's left is to steam a few leafy greens and have jasmine rice ready in the rice cooker. It's as easy as 1-2-3!

I barely have time for anything these days, and when I have very little time to cook, my go-to dish is a tofu stir fry. It’s nutritious and it allows me to make use of whatever I have on hand. Learn the basics and you’ll be able to dazzle your family with creative stir fry dishes.

One of my most favorite Indian dishes is nihari. It's a goat (or any other meat) stew dish. It's spicy, flavorful and the meat is extremely tender. I love dipping naans (flat Indian bread) in the sauce. But I always end up feeling so bad when I see my husband Lulu, who is a vegetarian, staring at me. So this time, I also made a tofu version using the same gravy sauce.

I chose medium-firm tofu and Japanese eggplants and deep-fried them. The texture is perfect once they are soaked in the spicy sauce. I also added broccoli for a balanced meal. The advantage of the veggie version is it's just as tasty, much healthier (I omitted the bhaghar, a typical final layer of red oil in a lot of Indian dishes) and it cooks a lot faster than the meat version.